Hot Topics:

Boulder's homeless mourn a friend, the latest in series of sad losses

Kathryn J. Fishman fourth transient to die since April 4

By Charlie Brennan, Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
05/17/2014 03:33:15 PM MDT

Updated:
05/17/2014 08:04:46 PM MDT

Three days after Kathryn Fishman was found dead at Scott Carpenter Park, one of two carts she was known to push around town was still parked alongside of the Boulder Creek Path, still containing some of her modest belongings. (Paul Aiken / Daily Camera)

Kathryn Fishman in a Boulder County Jail booking photo from earlier this year. (Boulder County Sheriff's Office)

Four people went to sleep under the eaves of a building at Scott Carpenter Park during the spring snowstorm that struck Boulder on the night before Mother's Day. Only three woke up.

The woman discovered by her friends to have died while they slept was identified two days later as Kathryn J. Fishman, 59.

Apparently homeless for a significant period of time, she had been a frequent visitor in recent weeks to the Scott Carpenter Park area, and was well known for pushing around not one shopping cart but two.

On a recent morning, one of Fishman's two carts still sat parked by the Boulder Creek Path on the park's southern edge, likely picked over by others — although no one had touched her box of Saltines.

Her belongings left behind included paperwork from her latest court appearance on a trespassing charge, plus a heavily creased and weatherbeaten card from the memorial service of another homeless woman who had preceded her in death, Janice "CJ" Adams. Adams' body had been discovered by the creek near Arapahoe Avenue and Broadway on April 4.

Adams, 53, is the first of four homeless people who have been found dead in Boulder in the past six weeks, and Fishman's death was the most recent.

Boulder homeless deaths since April 1

Janice 'CJ' Adams: Adams, 53, was discovered April 4 in the area of the Boulder Creek Path underpass near the intersection of Arapahoe Avenue and Broadway

Ralph Devore: Devore, 51, was found April 5 just east of the intersection of College Avenue and Broadway on the University of Colorado campus

Thomas Cornell: The body of Cornell, 32, formerly of Colorado Springs, was found in a drainage ditch behind the Boulder Target store at 2800 Pearl St. on April 15

Kathryn J. Fishman: Fishman, 59, died during the night of May 10 sleeping alongside a building at Scott Carpenter Park

The picture that emerges of Fishman from several who knew her is often conflicting, even on details as basic as surviving family, or how long she had been in Colorado.

According to the Boulder County Coroner's Office, she left behind a daughter, who lives in the state. The cause and manner of Fishman's death has not yet been determined, nor have those of the previous three transients to die.

Steve McMillian, 34, homeless in the Boulder area since 2009, knew Fishman through a friend whom he said was recently dating Fishman.

"One of her favorite spots was the lone bench at the top of Scott Carpenter," said McMillian, naming a few others who also frequented the area. "And we'd all be hanging out up there, watching the sunset, and we always commented on the fire in the sky, the point when the clouds turned pink. She just always had a smile for ya."

Not always, said others.

"She was depressed all the time," said Stephan Pals, 63, one of those who slept in the same spot as Fishman on the last night of her life. "She'd cry, like, out of the blue. That was kind of disconcerting."

On Fishman's final night, as snow mixed with rain and the area was under a winter storm warning, Pals, his girlfriend Nora Bootzin and a man who gave his name only as Patrick had already drifted off to sleep before Fishman returned with her carts.

"She came back in the middle of the night, making all of this noise, and I told her to shut the (expletive) up," Pals said. "And then it turned out the next morning she was dead, so I felt kind of bad about that."

Found in Kathryn Fishman's belongings was paperwork from a recent court date, and folded into that was a memento from the recent service for another homeless woman who died last month, Janice '"CJ" Adams. (Paul Aiken / Daily Camera)

As Pals and Patrick dashed over to Boulder Fire Station 3 for help shortly after dawn that frigid morning, Bootzin cradled Fishman in her arms.

"I rubbed her head and I told her, 'Kathy, It'll be all right. It'll be fine,''' Bootzin said.

"And I'm holding on to a dead lady."

'She would give you the shirt off her back'

At the horseshoe stone bench by the Boulder Creek Path near 13th Street and Arapahoe Avenue, several of the homeless people gathered there Thursday had some familiarity with Fishman — and pretty much everyone knew that yet another of their community had died.

Susan Dragon-Porter, 45, said she first learned of the tragedy from an initial report in the Daily Camera, which hadn't carried Fishman's name.

Stephan Pals and Nora Bootzin, who became engaged this week, slept alongside Kathryn Fishman the last night of her life at Scott Carpenter Park. (Paul Aiken / Daily Camera)

"I thought, the only person I know who goes around that park with a cart was Kathy," Dragon-Porter said. "She was a very nice lady. She would give you the shirt off her back if you needed it.

"She was crazy, but a good kind of crazy," she added. And, in a refrain repeated by several of Fishman's acquaintances, she noted, "She was on a lot of medication."

Since the start of the year, Boulder police Officer Ryan Scheevel has been assigned to the Pearl Street Mall detail. That includes Central Park and the Boulder municipal campus, the focus of recent heightened attention from city officials intent on correcting "social misbehavior" often associated with the transient community.

"Her name is familiar, but I don't specifically remember having any interaction or contact with her," Scheevel said of Fishman.

"A lot of the people that we have repeat contacts with, and repeat calls on, I guess a lot of them end up suffering from some type of mental issues or some type of substance abuse problems that they have. Those are the people that we repeatedly get called on or are repeatedly coming into contact with."

Isabel McDevitt, executive director of Bridge House, the Boulder-based homeless services center, said she did not know Fishman personally, but that the agency's records reflect that she had been a client since 2011.

"From her records, I know she was referred by the Municipal Court and other than that, that's literally all I have," McDevitt said.

She added, "I do know that she was very ill, but I don't have any real knowledge of the details of her situation. We do ask people for emergency contacts, but she did not give us one."

Court records show Fishman with a string of minor offenses in Colorado as far back as a 1992 negligence case in Jefferson County. She is listed as the respondent in a divorce action in Adams County in 1998, and her more recent legal problems all came in Boulder County.

She was arrested the evening of Feb. 24 at the Table Mesa King Soopers for allegedly trying to shoplift $36.80 worth of Maybelline and Cover Girl cosmetics, including makeup and lash curlers.

According to the arrest report, she told store manager Jon McNeill that "she intended to pay for the items and forgot," but then said she stole them because she did not have enough money.

Fishman's recent trespassing case stemmed from the afternoon of March 11 when she was found eating tacos in the University Memorial Center — just one day after being served with a one-year exclusion order from campus because she had been found sleeping on the east side of Hellems in the early morning hours.

The officer who ticketed her for trespassing noted, "Fishman said she remembered receiving the exclusion, but that she did not think it applied to the UMC." He noted her attitude as "fairly cooperative."

More recently, Fishman had been arrested — again by the CUPD — on April 24 on two outstanding warrants for failure to appear in court. The Boulder County Jail booking sheet indicates that she was required to be on Adderall, had a broken left arm and "has had pneumonia in the past."

According to a clerk for Boulder Municipal Court, Fishman made a May 8 court date for her CU trespassing case, was assigned defense counsel through legal aid, and was due back in court June 2.

Outside Bridge House on Wednesday morning, Penny Benson, 46, was another of the homeless who had come to know Fishman in recent years, and she said she saw many signs that her friend was on a downhill slide.

"I told her, 'Don't give up.' She always wanted to give up, but I told her, 'Don't give up, be strong.' But it was like she was going into the deep sea."

Life on the streets triggered by a head injury

Allan Graham met Fishman in the last 18 months through his work volunteering at the Deacons' Closet, an operation through Boulder's First Presbyterian Church that provides second-hand donated clothing to the needy.

Graham, a physician who served as director for chemical dependency treatment at Kaiser Permanente in Denver for 20 years before retiring, also volunteers at Bridge House. He facilitates a weekly addiction recovery group there and serves on its board of directors.

He joked that a program such as the Deacons' Closet "is sort of like inviting an alcoholic into a bar with free drinks." But with someone like Fishman, whom he said had the traits of a hoarder, it was not a humorous situation.

"She would always end up at the end of the morning with a very large pile of clothes that she was trying to decide what to take. She would often be in tears, and be so distressed," Graham said. "So I began to be her personal shopper. We would look at things together, and I would help her get herself organized more."

Graham learned through his time spent helping Fishman that her homelessness dated back to her having suffered a head injury, the circumstances of which he never learned.

He heard that her ex-husband was a Denver-area patent attorney. Graham thought she had two children, not one, but was never sure. She received a disability check through Social Security, he believed.

"Her life had changed after her head injury, and her behavior was quite characteristic of people with head injuries — she had a difficulty making choices, difficulty staying on task, and she had difficulty with problem solving," Graham said. "Those were things that made it particularly difficult for her to cope.

"She had the brain injury, and she knew that she was a different person after that brain injury."

The last time Graham saw Fishman, the week before she died, she needed a lot of clothes. She told him someone had stolen many of hers the week before. She nearly filled a garbage bag with a new assortment of used attire

"I was concerned about her, because it was physically a heavy bag, and she was a fairly small person," Graham said.

A heavy cast ran from one wrist nearly up to her elbow, the result of a recent fracture.

"I was saying, 'What are you going to do with all this?' She said, 'I have other people who can help me with it.'"

Graham was skeptical.

"It was fun to deal with her, because she could be rather light-hearted," Graham said. "But the really sad thing to me was, she felt like a child — and that's also true of people who have had head injuries and also people with Alzheimer's or dementia. They need more structure in their life.

"That was the concern that I had... She just shouldn't have been living on the street."

'Starting to feel like the end of the trail'

Along with the late-season blast of winter weather that struck Boulder two weeks into May, Fishman's passing, and the trio of deaths which preceded hers, put a chill into the homeless community.

Outside Bridge House, there was talk about the four who had recently died, and perhaps not surprisingly for a community informed often through word of mouth, some of the chatter bordered on the fantastical.

Recent measures taken by the city affecting Central Park and the downtown municipal campus — such as a smoking ban at the former, the smoking ban and surveillance cameras at the latter — have caused some to fan out toward other venues along the creek, or into other parks.

However, a ban on camping and closure of city parks between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. have not made things easier during warm-weather months when shelter space is significantly reduced.

The man who gave only his first name, Patrick, who woke up next to Fishman the night she died, isn't happy about the city's recent handling of the homeless.

"The cops just hand out tickets like water," said Patrick, who often works at the Boulder Farmers' Market. "The jail is not a homeless shelter. Where the (expletive) do I sleep?"

He added, "It sucks. This isn't my life. But it is what it is, for right now, today."

Dragon-Porter, as she sat and watched the snowmelt-swollen creek rush by, admitted, "I'm hoping I'm not going to die out here.

"But if I do, I'm going to be with my family," she said, gesturing at a cluster of friends on a nearby stone bench. "I wake up every morning and look up at those mountains, and I'm like, 'This is home. This is where I live.'"

Pals, who also was sleeping in the same spot as Fishman on her final night. admitted that, at 63, "It's starting to feel like the end of the trail. I've lived a long life."

But with a confident smile that even a heavy gray beard halfway down his chest couldn't conceal, Pals vowed, "I'm not going to be one of the people who fall in the creek or are found dead in the grass or fall off the wall.

MacIntyre says the completed project will be best in Pac-12There were bulldozers, hard hats, mud, concrete trucks, blueprints, mud, cranes, lots of noise and, uh, mud, during the last recruiting cycle when Colorado football coach Mike MacIntyre brought recruits to campus. Full Story

Most people don't play guitar like Grayson Erhard does. That's because most people can't play guitar like he does. The guitarist for Fort Collins' Aspen Hourglass often uses a difficult two-hands-on-the-fretboard technique that Eddie Van Halen first popularized but which players such as Erhard have developed beyond pop-rock vulgarity.
Full Story